


March of Progress

by fluorescentgrey, llyn



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - America, Drug Use, Humor, Hux Vs. Chaos, M/M, Mardi Gras, Porn With Plot, chaos wins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-18
Updated: 2016-05-18
Packaged: 2018-06-09 03:49:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6888724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey, https://archiveofourown.org/users/llyn/pseuds/llyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hux wakes up on Mardi Gras day determined not to sleep with Ren, his mysterious voodoo neighbor. He has a duty to lead the Starkiller Neighborhood Marching Band through the French Quarter in display of sonic eschaton. Plus, he'd never make that mistake twice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	March of Progress

It turned out it was rather not a walk in the park to corral twenty plus vaguely musical stoners into a marching band of even passing caliber. Even for Hux, who loved barking orders so much it often gave him a cold sexual thrill. He himself had started as a lowly trumpet player in the Starkiller Neighborhood Marching Band at age eighteen as a new and homesick freshman at Tulane and had risen swiftly through the ranks likely because he had politely declined every drug that was offered him by every deadbeat loser who could kind of play “Centerfold” but who was really just in it to play shitty covers of horrible dubstep. He saw no such ambition in the corps of which he was now commander. Which probably explained why none of them — not a one — had shown up even remotely on time to the ten AM rehearsal he had scheduled in the parking lot of the YMCA. He could no longer afford to cut parts, he thought, pacing; he had already cut like, at least eight. There were only two remaining trombonists (granted the other two who had since been fired were dismal and also just assholes) and his best tuba player was looking mutinous. Granted he had long doubted that kid’s loyalty. 

He was on the verge of just out and going home when Phasma came tooling into the parking lot as quick as her junkyard Corolla would carry her. Mitaka and Thanisson were in the backseat, both wearing dark sunglasses and looking achingly hungover. Phasma’s drumkit case was sticking partly out the window. On the staticky stereo they were listening to Townes Van Zandt. 

When she pulled up beside him Hux leaned in the passenger side window. “What the fuck is wrong with you all.” 

“It’s Mardi Gras, General,” Phasma rasped. From the backseat Thanisson moaned, clutching his stomach. 

“The parade is in four days and we’re woefully unprepared in case you haven’t noticed,” said Hux, dodging the back door when Thanisson thrust it open as well as the outpouring of tequila-y vomit that quickly followed. 

“Everyone’s going to be shitfaced,” said Mitaka. He had apparently enough of his wits about him to go around to the trunk (Phasma didn’t even need to pop it for him as it was tied shut with a clothesline) and wrestle out his clarinet case from the stacked equipment. It was wedged partly under one of Phasma’s countless bongs. “We don’t have to be any good, Hux; we just have to be loud.” 

“We have to be good and also loud,” Hux said; he was on the verge of yelling. “Obviously.” 

“Please lower your voice,” said Thanisson from the car. 

“People in other bands take this whole endeavor considerably more seriously,” Hux said. 

“No they fucking don’t,” Phasma reminded him. “You take this more seriously than anyone else in this entire city and it’s going to give you an ulcer by the time you’re thirty I swear to God.” Yet still she had crouched on the asphalt to tighten up her drums. 

“Is anyone else coming?” 

“We called Finn and he said he was on his way.” 

“Is he bringing Nines?” 

“I don’t know. He sounded hungover.” 

“God fucking damn it,” said Hux. How was he supposed to wreak sonic havoc with this crew of wastoids? 

“Get the fucking stick out of your ass please before I do something rash, Hux,” said Phasma. 

“Don’t resort to vulgarity because you know I’m right.” 

“You weren’t this much of an asshole last year,” said Thanisson, rinsing his mouth out with something from Phasma’s nalgene which, knowing her, likely was not water. He had covered the vomit on the asphalt with a sheet of six-week-old newspaper and was putting together his saxophone in the backseat. 

“He was getting laid last year,” said Phasma. 

“Do _not_ go there.” 

“Stop being a dick. This is supposed to be fun. And like it or not on the day of reckoning itself which as you remind us fast approaches everyone will be having fun but you. Because of the stick up your ass.” 

The year previous after a whirlwind performance which in retrospect had probably gone shittily but at the time had felt good possibly because his eardrums had been blown flat and/or because he had accepted something from Phasma he now doubted was “just molly,” Hux had run into his neighbor, whom he had long suspected was some kind of voodoo priest, and they had spent several hours fucking on a bare mattress in the slug-infested apartment he was disturbed to find bordered his own. In fact it was so bad Hux had been groping for an nth condom somewhere toward the late beginning of proceedings and had put his fucking hand directly on one. Of course he had shrieked, humiliatingly. Of all the sexual encounters he had ever had, of which there were more than a few, this one was the most like a deleted scene from _Twin Peaks_. He woke just before dawn sober and crept out holding his shoes and passed back out on his own blissfully neat side of the shotgun house. His goal had been to try and pretend it had not happened at all but since that day said neighbor had tormented him with loud sex noises, louder noise music at all hours of the day and night, and egregious furniture moving sounds Hux doubted were humanly possible. Plus there was the constant herby and soporific smell of something that could not even be some kind of organic slug repellent, and there was the detailed, humid, and intoxicating erotic dreaming he blamed on simple proximity. It deeply bothered Hux, who was fastidious and who made a habit of avoiding regretful affairs and who had above all no patience for mysticism. He had long seen himself as a sort of more effective, less racist Kurtz character in the grand _Heart of Darkness_ allegory that was doing one’s best to live in New Orleans when one had been born and raised in Upstate New York. 

“I do not have a stick up my ass,” said Hux to Phasma now; “I just like things to be done with a fraction of competency.” 

“More Yankee bullshit,” said Thanisson. “How are you even eligible to be a New Orleans Mardi Gras bandleader if you were born North of the Mason-Dixon?” 

He could be such a little fucking shit. But then, so could Mitaka, who said, “He was born in practically Canada.” 

“If you want to bust out your Birther conspiracies in attempt to depose me just rest assured you do not want my fucking job.” 

Luckily he was saved from further goading by the arrival of Finn and Nines who arrived in Nines’ mom’s minivan with their tubas, severe hangovers, and generally bleak and traitorous attitudes. Hux suspected Finn was playing with the Resistance Marching Band on the side because he was definitely dating one, or perhaps two, of their saxophonists. Quickly following them were the rest of the band members, one of whom brought a cooler full of gatorade to everyone’s relief. They practiced halfheartedly for about an hour, interrupted by several breaks for vomiting and/or gatorade chugging. At least they made it through every song, though there was more than one excruciating rough patch. Still when Hux dismissed them he felt beneath all his frustration at their juvenility a note of ecstatic, fatherly pride. They were really, really fucking loud. 

\--

“Are Thanisson and Mitaka dating,” Hux asked Phasma later when they met up for the debriefing and gossip session at their local krewe headquarters: their long-standing Mardi Gras tradition. Phasma had been Hux’s RA the single year he lived on Tulane campus, yet she had offered to buy him drugs and/or take him clubbing. This was of course before he had even had a puff of a joint, and while he was still claiming to be heterosexual, and just after he had written his college admissions essay about Ayn Rand. 

“I think just hooking up,” Phasma said, starting in on her nth gin and tonic. 

Hux made a face he later realized was a little cruel. “That age difference is rather — intriguing.” 

“Well how old is your fucking voodoo neighbor? He looked all of like, twenty-three…” 

“I have no idea how old he is,” said Hux, who in fact had entertained the possibility he was some kind of ageless occult monastic arisen dripping from the bayou. “I haven’t seen him since last year. I’ve just overheard all his sex and furniture moving noises.” 

Phasma laughed. “Which is more annoying?” 

In truth, the sex. Not because of jealousy, Hux told himself, but because it was fucking weird. “The furniture moving. I don’t even remember his having much of anything. But it sounds like elephants being shoved across the floor.” 

“Sure,” said Phasma. “Are you going to see him again this year?” 

“Not if I can help it.” 

“Really?” She hid her smile behind her smudged glass. “It was funny. Last year for a whole week after you were glowing like a pregnant lady but also barking at everyone who approached you. I figured it had to have been pretty ridiculous sex.” 

“It was,” said Hux, “and it was a one time thing.” 

“Alright,” she said. Her mouth pursed. “Well then you should come with us to this party after the parade.” 

“I don’t like parties.”

“You’ll like this one. They’re getting an actual DJ.” As though that would convince Hux, who hated DJs, and who had sat in the back corner the single time Phasma had managed to talk him into clubbing. “It’s down the street from me at this abandoned mansion.” 

“There are abandoned mansions in New Orleans proper?” 

“Well, a couple. Since Katrina. You should come — everyone’s coming.” 

Previous Mardi Gras he had posted up in the back corner of a busy bar like some sort of voyeuristic wild west villain solely to watch folks get wasted and make shitty decisions. He relished the sense of removal from chaos, as though he were a sort of overlord viewing the debauchery from Olympus. Then, of course, last year had happened. 

“I’ll sit this one out,” Hux said. “Thanks for the invite.” 

Phasma rolled her eyes. “Why don’t you just out and tell me you’re going to try and fuck that dude again.” 

“Cause I’m not going to try and fuck that dude again, Phas, like I keep fucking saying.” 

“Whatever. I’m just telling you I wouldn’t push you on this party if I knew the truth.” 

Despite all her cocked eyebrows and purchasing of alcoholic beverages Hux continually abstained. This would be the year to regain thoroughly his rightful role as the aloof order-maintaining suzerain of proceedings and he was not going to let even the woman who probably (disturbingly) qualified as his best friend get in the way of his sanctified responsibility. 

Phasma had to depart the krewe headquarters eventually after a slew of texts from a girlfriend and as such Hux retreated to the all-but-unused locker room downstairs with the dregs of the last beer she’d bought him to run through and through and through again a few of the songs from the band’s arsenal. 

\--

He woke just after dawn on the day of the parade and could not get back to sleep. After a while of staring at the ceiling he showered and dressed in the parade outfit he had laid out the night before, had a bit of toast (blackened and unbuttered as he had always liked it) and a cup of coffee, grabbed his trumpet case and went out, intending on a walk before he was due to meet the band at the staging ground. 

It was so quiet on the street this early he could hear the levers of the lock tumbling around his key, and then he heard the voice from the other side of the porch. “Happy Mardi Gras,” said his neighbor, from the decaying fire-hazard porch swing Hux had never before seen him occupy. Judging by the array of ash and cigarettes in the cut-glass bowl on the railing he had been sitting there since before dawn. Lying in wait, Hux’s mind supplied. His heart, traitorously, skipped a beat or two. 

Mail came for this neighbor addressed to Ben Solo and indeed that was the name on the mailbox and on the lease but he had introduced himself as Ren upon the occasion of their single previous meeting. There was something eternally unvocalized in the lush red mouth and a smear of ash at the jaw and the big dark wet eyes were like very still water. His legs were open at the knee into a rough and disconcertingly inviting diamond and his head-to-toe black clothing made his skin look very pale. Blown across the porch were a few sharp black feathers, dark and shining oily as a corvid’s. 

God fucking damn it _,_ Hux nearly said aloud. Instead he said “Happy Mardi Gras.” 

“You look nice.” 

The sick grin in Ren’s voice was like grease or butter. Hux felt like some kind of prey animal. Slowly and measuredly he turned on his heel in adept marching band style as he had learned in middle school, straightened his back and shoulders, took up his trumpet case and stalked down the steps. He could feel Ren staring at his ass, tightened his fists, could not help his own sneer. 

Do not look back, he was thinking, you are not Lot’s wife, you’re the best bandleader in this jungle city. You’re an adult and you have self-control and your apartment is not infested by slugs and you do not depend on pretentious false paganisms to make an impression with those you wish to seduce. 

Yet still as though he were some fish on a line he turned at the street corner certain Ren wouldn’t still be watching but indeed he was. He had relocated to the stoop in order to lean his long strange disastrous body up against the porch post, nth cigarette spiraling smoke into the still air. That conniving expression was visible on his face even from half a block away. Hux looked down at his feet again only to find one of the black feathers wedged inexorably into the weave of his bootsole.

 --

Hux showed up at the parade staging grounds after a thoughtful head-clearing walk and three espresso shots to find, to his surprise, half his band already assembled in their parade-day finery, passing cigarettes and blunts, helping each other with makeup, and decorating their instruments. They were all wearing enamel pins emblazoned with the Starkiller logo and featuring their initials heavily stylized — “S’n’M” with a minuscule B. Mitaka stuck one immediately to Hux’s lapel. 

“How many pairs of flashed tits are you banking on this year, Phasma,” Thanisson said, saluting Hux. He was alternating between sucking rather excessively erotically on his saxophone reed and taking deep drags from the joint he and Mitaka were sharing. It was smeared with Thanisson’s purple lipstick toward the filter. 

Phasma laughed. With her face uncharacteristically full of makeup and her clothes spangled and tightly fitted (red velvet leotard bustier with tights and saddle shoes) she looked like the court jester consort of a decadent, wild princess. “Well last year I got eleven. Pairs that is. So I suppose I’ve got to go for fifteen.” 

“Here’s to fifteen,” said Nines, raising a Nalgene full of decidedly not water. 

Together they toasted with their respective intoxicants; even Hux toasted, though he wouldn’t go for anything but cigarettes until after the march. “To fifteen pairs of tits for Phasma,” Mitaka intoned like a monk, “a simple Southern belle dyke par excellence — ” Phasma leaned in and kissed his cheekbone — “and to the Starkiller Neighborhood Marching Band, and to pure sonic havoc.”

“To pure sonic havoc,” everyone shouted.

They went over the setlist together and those that needed it arranged their sheet music. Together they warmed up with stretches and scales and run-throughs of the weak spots Hux had identified at the rehearsal at the YMCA. Other bands had begun to arrive (including, Hux noted with a sneer, the folks from Resistance), as had scores of drag queens and dolled-up dancers, jazz and blues bands on massive artful floats, beauty queens and strongmen posing together, and locals and tourists alike, looking for a sneak preview. Everyone was armed with jewels real and false as well as water bottles full of straight liquor and/or cigarette boxes packed with skinny joints. Beads were already flying and most of Starkiller’s members were quickly bedecked with rainbows of glimmering color. The sun emerged from the clouds with an almost spiritual weight as the parade announcers began organizing the groups in the order in which they would march through the French Quarter. 

Snakes and butterflies had begun their sort of Garden-of-Eden atavistic struggle in Hux’s belly. Starkiller pressed into formation and Phasma started up a brisk snappy roll from the rear. Hux chanced a look back at her — her platinum hair in incredible victory rolls, her black lipstick, her massive octagonal sunglasses — and she smiled, cocking an eyebrow. Finn and Nines kicked in an arpeggiating tuba warm-up and piece by piece the rest of the band riffed over the top. A thing of aggressive and destructive beauty, Hux had written in the band’s charter upon the admittedly rather mystical occasion of their founding. A thing of singular sonic death. A harbinger of musical eschaton. 

Behind him the drummers, led by Phasma, let out a wild war whoop. Just in front of Hux Thanisson elbowed Mitaka and together their row stepped forward and the march began. Batons twirling high into the bright springtime air and the sun against the windows of the old buildings spangling against the ivy and the street. They always warmed up with a few Motown covers and old standards then got into the bass-heavy tunes Nines had termed “booty-shakin music” toward the end of the parade when everyone was drunk and would be impressed by just a lot of loud blaring. The goal this year was to drown out the Resistance and Republic neighborhood bands — Republic, the longest established group, walked in front as was customary, and Resistance were three floats behind. It was going to depend on prevailing winds and everyone’s breath control, which they were supposed to have rehearsed. By the end of their cover of “You Really Got a Hold On Me” Hux caught a dirty look from the Republic’s bandleader just ahead. They were on the right track. Moving into the next song he had a couple-second break so he cast a look into the crowd, trying to keep his smile relatively placid. The flash of sun and gold in someone’s dark hair was gone when he double-taked; he figured he’d imagined it. Still he was a measure late coming in. 

\--

At the end of the parade, after a few bouts of near-fisticuffs with rival bandleaders, Starkiller retired to the side street where Nines had parked his mom’s minivan, in which he had stashed a cooler full of now-lukewarm beers. Together they cheered the last march of the Republic and the Resistance and the fact that Phasma had been flashed by, at some counts, seventeen different women. Blunts were passed and someone left for ten minutes and came back with six pizzas. Finally, Hux, sensing the afternoon’s descent into debauchery in its beginning stages, started saying his goodbyes. 

“Are you sure you’re not going to come to this party,” Phasma said from where she sat like a gargoyle on the minivan’s bumper. 

“I’m sure,” said Hux. “I’ve got — plans.” 

“Sure,” she said, smirking. Still as he stalked off, lighting a celebratory cigarette, she texted him the address. 

Around the corner he stopped to answer her message and it was then that he saw the first black feather. He shrugged it off as coincidence and walked on. But then there were more — on the sidewalk, in the gutters, blown against the brick walkways and caught in the spiderwebs and spanish moss. More of them the further he got toward the center of the madness, where he preferred to camp out. 

When a full cluster of them blew across his path Hux turned heel, high-tailed it out of that neighborhood, and looked up directions to Phasma’s party on his phone. _I am coming after all_ , he texted her, summoning an Uber. She responded in a few seconds with a string of french horn emojis. 

\--

He had been doubtful about Phasma's description of the place but when he climbed out of the Uber it was indeed an abandoned and decaying Victorian mansion on an expansive lot surrounded by a partly collapsed, rusting wrought-iron fence. Lanterns lined the driveway and sat in the darkened windows in a sort of Southern Gothic tableau and Hux joined the stream of revelers heading up toward the french doors, thrown open upon a scene only somewhat tamer than _Eyes Wide Shut_. Most of the interesting characters from the parade were in attendance as well as a slew of unfamiliar folks in fabulous garb caught in the gaslights like courtesans from ancient celebrations. 

Sometimes living in the South it felt like you’d been shoved back a few hundred years by accident. Hux doubted he’d ever be used to it. He sought Phasma for a while and eventually gave up (likely she was in a closet somewhere, stroking an unfamiliar clitoris by candlelight) and sought the booze. It was cheap and aplenty and manned by two nymphlike beings of uncertain, indefinable gender; one recognized Hux or his parade outfit and poured him an extra tequila shot to go with his gin and ginger. On the house, they mouthed, winking hugely with impossible eyelashes. 

So perhaps there was an option for later if he was feeling like it, Hux thought, carrying his drinks to the big ballroom. He gulped the shot in one when he caught eye of Thanisson and Mitaka dancing, if something so erotically unchoreographed could be called dancing, together in one corner. They were both nude from the waist up but for an ecstasy of multicolored beads and Thanisson, half swooning in Mitaka’s arms and thoroughly limp with rapture, looked as though he were on some psychedelic trip. It was disconcertingly hot. Hux loosened his collar and also grimaced. Then he heard the voice at his shoulder. 

“They’re sexy together,” said Ren from beside him. “Do you not think so?” 

The devil himself had pulled his long black hair up to show the tarnishing ancient gold pieces in his ears and at his long neck. His face was a bit flushed from drinking but had not lost that damned conniving look. Screenprinted on his t-shirt was the veve with the cross and the double coffins that was meant to summon Baron Samedi, as Hux dimly remembered from his first year anthropology seminar. He wondered if the image still had its ritual effect if it was severed before the base, as Ren had cut his shirt there to show a good three inches of his stomach. Muscle and an artful and perhaps symbolic smear of ash. More gold, Hux noted grimly, in his belly button. _Fuck_. 

“Mitaka’s double Thanisson’s age at least,” Hux told him.

“It’s sexy,” Ren insisted. “He’s like Persephone.” 

“Mitaka’s no Hades,” said Hux, rather affronted that Mitaka even seemed as such to a stranger from a distance. This was a man who loved jazz, played the fucking clarinet, and drank white wine. His most lascivious characteristic was this apparent taste for much younger men, which admittedly Hux had always known him to keep pretty close to his chest. Always until now: Hux watched again across the packed dance floor; now they were kissing, and Mitaka had his whole hand down the back of Thanisson’s pants. 

Hux went for the door into the backyard, figuring a glimpse of public fingering conducted by two actual acquaintances was more than enough for this year’s festivities. To his consternation he could feel Ren — could smell him, like petrichor, like a forest — following. It was as though the crowd parted like the proverbial sea and Hux could tell it wasn’t for himself. 

If he’d thought he would escape public fingering in the backyard he was out of luck. At least most of it was being conducted in the bushes. There was a single unoccupied chair on the fancy decaying porch and Hux sat in it. 

“This whole city is horny as hell,” he said to Ren, who leaned up against the porch railing and produced from some hitherto unseen pocket in his skin-tight black pants a cigarette case which turned out to contain only a few expertly pre-rolled blunts. He lit a choice one and passed it to Hux; the dutch tasted like pine. 

“It’s Mardi Gras,” Ren said; “Have you not seen every single deadly sin on display today.” 

“Not a ton of wrath.”

“You looked pretty wrathful earlier.” 

He was smiling a little in the corner of his pretty mouth. Don’t go in there, Hux thought desperately. Resist, resist, resist. “So you were there?” he asked. 

“Yes,” said Ren. “You looked like you would — ” He pressed his tongue into his lower lip in a mimicry of contemplation. “Like you would do whatever you had to in the service of order.” 

“Does that turn you on?” 

“Rarely.” 

Hux gulped his gin and tonic. From the bushes he heard a melismatic scream of orgasm, joined quickly and symphonically by another. Ren smirked. “I saw your feathers in the French Quarter,” said Hux. “Going Southwards.” 

“This isn’t 1820 and you’re not a tracker,” Ren laughed. “And they’re not _my_ feathers.” 

“Well then the fucking feathers that just show up whenever you’re around.” 

“Better,” Ren told him, “almost.” 

Hux passed the blunt back. It was halfway gone; he could feel it creeping heavily up his spine. “What the fuck are you?” 

The placid look on Ren’s face had to be — what did they call it? Glamour. “I’m your neighbor.” 

“I mean really, Ren, what the fuck.” 

For a moment he thought he saw through it. The sharp teeth. But it was just someone in the door — Phasma, who was leading one of the nymphish bartenders shyly by the slender beringed hand. When she saw Hux and Ren her eyebrows skyrocketed into her collapsing victory rolls. “I can’t tell you,” Ren said. “Want to eat some mushrooms?” 

\--

On the street the air was still and it smelled wet as rain. Like a summer flood. Beads and beer cans and joint clips and coke baggies abandoned in the street like jetsam from a sinking ship. The wind moved in the trees and the eaves of the houses and the overgrown lawn of the abandoned house. Hux chanced a look for the stars but the fast-moving clouds prohibited. Dragging each other across the firmament, Hux thought, feeling his brain expanding like a balloon. Ren’s big spidery hand steadied him by the small of the back. 

“Where are you from,” Ren asked. 

“God,” said Hux, “what the fuck?” 

“I’m not allowed to know basic biographical information — ” 

“It’s just fucking weird,” said Hux. But perhaps it was indeed relevant. “I’m from Lake Placid New York.” 

Up where the whims of this world were mostly contained. Up where they came reaching out like some Lovecraftian horrorshow only on particular days in Autumn or in early Spring depending on where you were. 

“I suppose you’re from here in New Orleans.” 

Ren shook his head. “Terrebonne Parish.” 

“I don’t know where that is.” 

“Southwest of here. Anyway it won’t be there much longer.” 

Then the world as Hux knew it dropped out and something else stirred forth from the blur of it. The place you come from is different, Ren said, inside Hux’s head, his voice echoing as in some underground chamber. We might as well not even be on the same planet anymore if you really think about it. 

He was leading Hux by the hand through the swimming void. The still black water in which they were knee-deep. He moved with a fell grace like a dancer arisen from the crypt and for a moment Hux saw him naked then he was clothed in full black robes. In the air he sketched symbols with one sharp bony finger and Hux saw him as a skeleton. Death’s head, death’s body. There was no selfhood to him because he was every self. He could flow from one to the other and back again the way this world sometimes could. 

They walked deeper into the nothingness and around them the drunken revelers who passed seemed like damned souls languishing in purgatory. It was not hell he was following Ren to; it was something worse or better… he understood now there was no distinction so simple between black and white. Wherever they were going was both and everything. Sin was relative as was wrongness. And regret. Down in the well of it was a wild purity like the compression of the universe before the big bang. Confined chaos. Shivering forth in an apocalypse of ecstasy. The profound universal orgasm that was alpha and omega. 

“Come on inside,” said Ren. He was holding open the very liquid mouth of it but it was just the door to his apartment. 

\--

Hux sat gingerly in a decaying armchair feeling like the deposed king of a lost empire as Ren poured them each mason jars half-full of blood-red wine. This time, blessedly, there was not a slug to be seen — instead there were crickets whose leg-rubbing mating song sounded like distant faulty machinery. As Hux had thought he remembered the apartment was eerily empty of furniture but for a table by the door hosting an ashtray and a twin cut-glass bowl of keys, said armchair, and the bare stained mattress on the floor which was surrounded by candles like a fairy ring of mushrooms. 

“Are you planning to cut my throat on that thing,” Hux said. 

Ren had crouched to light the candles. “What would be the fun in that?” 

“This looks like the scene of a satanic murder.” 

Ren laughed. “That’s not what I do.” 

“What, satanism?” 

“Murder.” His tongue pressed his lower lip. Hux watched, dry-mouthed, the ridges of his spine shifting under his pale freckled skin. When the candles were lit he started up lighting the shards of wood and hunks of herb matter sitting between them in chipped and mismatched ramekins and saucers. The smell was heady and sweet like something you might catch unawares in the full summer forest. 

Hux shut his eyes. “What kind of ritual is this for, then.” 

“I think you know.” 

“Maybe.” 

When he opened his eyes Ren was very close. Hux had not so much as heard him approach. He was undoing the finer gold pieces from his neck and when he had put them down on the table by the door he let down his wild hair like he was some seduced highland damsel. When he took his shirt off showing his lovely chest and belly and his rosy nipples one of which — _fuck —_ was pierced with a gold ring Hux thought, I am still on fucking shrooms and probably I am hallucinating. But then Ren came close again and Hux touched him and he was real. At least as real as anything could be on the very naked threshold of chaos.

“I have something for you,” said Ren. 

“Is it your cock.” 

He laughed. “No. Something else.”

They went to the mattress stepping carefully over the candles and Ren lifted Hux’s shirt off and started on his own worrisome pants. He was naked underneath, of course; his cock was big, a little crooked, not yet fully hard. As long and strange as the rest of him; this Hux remembered. Last year — Ren working inside him inch by painstaking inch, forcing his breath out roughly through his nose. Now Ren lay on his back to pull the pants off his ankles and Hux dared to touch one strong, taught thigh; dared a little more, crept a hand lower toward the damp thatch of coarse hair, the seam of his balls, the soft and secret intimate skin there, the —

He looked up at Ren with a sudden bolt of surprise. Back on the handsome face was the expression of pure, self-assured, irrepressible conniving. Liquidly he turned himself onto his hands and knees and shoved his bony ass back into Hux’s hands, against the undone fly of his spangled parade pants. The thing in him was nauseatingly pastel in color and its base was shaped artfully like a four leaf clover. 

“What’s this about,” said Hux measuredly. 

“I had a dream that we would fuck again this year,” Ren said over his shoulder. “And then when I saw you this morning I knew for certain.” 

“Did you also foresee my topping this time or…” 

“Well yes and also I figured it was only f — ” 

Hux pressed in hard on the center of the clover if only to deny himself the mental image of Ren fucking his ass into this no-doubt irredeemable mattress that had certainly been carted in years previous off the street. Against his hands he could feel Ren spasm. 

“ _Lex talionis_ ,” Ren panted. 

“An ass for an ass, is that it?” The laughter was fractured and broken. “I didn’t know voodoo folk had a mouth for Latin.” 

“I keep telling you,” said Ren, “I don’t do voodoo.” 

“Explain your fucking Baron Samedi shirt. And how the fuck you lured me back into your slug-infested demon lair.” 

“I got rid of the slugs, asshole, and don’t fucking blame me for — ” 

Before Ren could finish exactly what fault of Hux’s he felt had been deferred to himself Hux pushed two fingers into his mouth. The lips and tongue were soft and smooth as velvet and he felt the strange vibration when Ren moaned as a kind of livid tectonic motion shoving through him, but perhaps that was the mushrooms. With his other hand he traced a finger around Ren’s plug, feeling his residual slickness. A shiver started unfurling low in his belly. Ren shoved back against him again, back bowing deep like a supplicant, long lithe spine not unlike a snakebeast illustrated by Giger. At this thought, disturbingly, Hux’s cock leapt. 

“Did you prep yourself enough for me or were you hoping I would eat you out.” This of course had been the most humiliating part of last year’s proceedings and yet it had also been the one Hux had in the interim returned to most frequently while he masturbated or even once or twice with other less skilled partners. 

He took his fingers from Ren’s mouth long enough to let him answer. “Later,” he gasped, “eat me later, fuck me now.” 

Hux could not even be bothered that he hadn’t said please. With his fingers back in Ren’s wet mouth he pulled the plug from his body watching with a possessing morbid interest just how he shifted. The muscle and the bones moving in synchronic tandem under his skin and his delicate pink hole fluttering, hollow, starved like a lidless eye, wet and distended from his earlier ministrations. Curious, Hux blew across him; he felt Ren’s cry against his fingertips, the shiver through his own body. Current transfer. Again, perhaps the shrooms. He took his fingers from Ren’s mouth, traced down his spine, slicked his cock and lined it up with his wet hand. And Ren absorbed him, swallowing as quicksand, endless and devouring; for one exhilarating second he thought he would never bottom out, he would just keep going until he was all gone. When Ren’s hips came flush to his it was almost a surprise. In something halfway between wonder and disgust Hux traced his fingers around where they were joined, feeling the stretch of Ren’s body and his openness. He had hung his lovely head between his shoulders and as Hux watched he lowered himself carefully to his folded elbows. Then he looked back over his shoulder again. A flush had risen into his face and his eyes were dark and yearning in the candlelit dimness. “Are you going to take me or what.” 

What was the point of his using that archaic terminology, Hux wondered. He pulled out enough just the head of his cock remained inside, let Ren feel that for a moment, then shoved back inside. Ren screamed. What was the point of his using that archaic terminology when Hux was the one being taken? All the way down into the molten pressing heat, the mulch beneath all the layers of bayou where dead things came back together into stone. The fate of living in the South was to be swallowed, he thought; here was his proof of it. He would never leave this room again — he had not left this room, not fully, since he had first ventured inside. Ren and his demon fishhook ever reeling. As soon as he knew he could have this there was never any coming out. 

He fucked Ren vengefully, working the strange body by the hips as though he weren't himself doomed. Ren had pressed his face to the mattress and braced one hand against the peeling wallpaper so he could leverage himself back against Hux. With the other he jerked his big ungainly cock such that Hux could feel him, his pleasure shaking down inside himself, muscle rippling… “Come inside me,” Ren said, surprisingly clear; his cheek was roughened raw from the mattress, his lips swollen from being bitten and being kissed, and in his eyes, horrifyingly, was that shrewd conniving look from that very morning on that very porch. “Hux…” He stretched like a cat, his back arched impossibly; he was close: Hux could feel his trembling. “Hux, I need — fill me up. Give it to me, give me everything…” 

He had — he feared he would always. He pressed his cock deep and in a moment of thrilling madness pushed a thumb into Ren alongside it, bracing the rest of his hand against the blunt ridge of Ren’s tailbone. When Ren’s body yielded for the thumb he came, with a guttural sob, then Hux did, feeling him. For a moment thereafter things swam without definition — the long and starved and aching planes of Ren’s body stretched like taffy (this was for certain the mushrooms) — and Hux realized far belatedly that the series of animal grunts was his own. Ren was twitching on his softening cock, his body in a desperate, hungry wave. He had braced both hands upon the wall in order to shove his ass impossibly upward. What else can I put in him, Hux thought, pulling out woozily, he needs it… 

He settled for two thumbs. Held Ren open and watched with a grim fascination as his own come leaked from the raw hole down the strong ruddy thighs trembling in extremity. The lovely face damp with sweat and the hair curling in it about the temples and at the nape of the neck. Hux groped for the forgotten plug; he’d lost it somewhere on the bed. When he found it he wiped it cleanish on Ren’s thigh and slid it back inside him until the clover base nestled flush between his asscheeks. Then they lay together, Hux reluctantly, on the horrible mattress. Around them two of the candles had burned out and three more were guttering. The humidity of their sex was oppressive and there were three crickets on the walls that Hux could count. 

“Are you trying to eat me up,” Hux asked, gathering his breath like something he had dropped. 

“I tried that,” said Ren, hoarse, “last year. You liked it.” 

“I don’t mean — nevermind.” 

“You mean like Hansel and Gretel?” Ren smiled. “I told you I’m not a witch.” 

“I don’t believe you.” 

Ren turned on his back and folded his hands carefully over his belly. “You can believe whatever you want.” 

They dozed and in about a half an hour Hux turned Ren back on his stomach, slid the plug again from his body, licked him clean and fucked him dirty again. In another hour Ren rose for a “glass of water” and returned with a dildo with which he athletically fucked himself while Hux watched from the armchair across the room, tripping very much for real again, imagining he was viewing this as a sort of occult induction ritual somewhere down in the dark on the bayou, surrounded by fellows of Ren’s voodoo order, strange priests in dark robes who would not show their faces. Finally Hux stood and went to Ren’s side intending to assist with the toy but Ren shoved him against the wall (a few crickets crunched) and swallowed Hux’s cock, sharp nose pressed to his belly, as though he were drawing poison out. Hux was too far gone now to care about the ghostly shamans accompanying them there but sometimes he thought he felt their hands on his skin, touching his hair and his belly and his neck… whispering into his ear words of an incantation he did not yet understand. 

I surrender, he thought at the last. I surrender, you win, please have me. 

\--

He woke at dawn, sober-ish, and groaned, rubbed his eyes, stretched his back in the bed. Beside him Ren was lying asleep as though in state with his arms crossed loosely over his chest. His fingernails were bitten ragged and bloody about the beds, Hux noticed for the first time. 

When he stood his head was swimming and nausea stirring in his gut. He went to the sink and shoved the pots and pans (encrusted with what decidedly was not human food) out of the way in order to fill what looked like a cleanish glass of water. Cockroaches scuttled around the drain in a busy curiosity. Hux went to put his parade pants on (eschewing the rest in the humidity), snagged a blunt clip from Ren’s ashtray and an engraved lighter from the side table, and slipped out the door. 

Outside the morning breeze was cool and wet and carried a storm just visible now across the rooftops of the houses. It moved in the trees and the language it spoke was secret but Hux could hear in it someone far away playing the blues. He lit the blunt clip and smoked it until he could no longer pinch the burning ember between his thumb and index fingernails. By that time he could smell the thunder coming with the wind up out of the long stretching sinking bayou and beyond it the sea. He stood and stretched again and then he went back inside.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks be due to the lovely [llyn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/llyn/pseuds/llyn), voodoo princess, etc., for this concept, and for endless cheering, assistance, and inspiration. thank you for allowing me the excuse to write the porniest porn i have ever attempted.
> 
> HUGE MASSIVE THANKS also to the incredible [its-pixiesthings](http://its-pixiesthings.tumblr.com/), for pinch hitting this beautiful art at the very last minute. [here's the post](http://its-pixiesthings.tumblr.com/post/145478560390/pinch-hitting-for-the-lovely-yeats-infections) on her tumblr if you want to share!


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